OFF LIMITS

Up a creek with a paddling: It seems like just yesterday that loudmouth homophobe Bob Enyart was your average divorced, lonely talk-show host, packing a gun to work at his gig for KHNC, the "patriot" radio station way out there in tiny Johnstown. Now he's married and a convicted spanker. Talk about a fast worker!

It was only last May 10 that Enyart strapped on his pistol after his then-nightly radio show and, in front of a reporter, told fellow blabber Norm Resnick, "Well, I'm off on a blind date, Norm. Some nurse in Longmont." Less than six weeks later Enyart was engaged to an Arvada woman, Cheryl Mayns, and he was telling her two little boys, Stephen and Anthony, "From this day forward, we can have fun and be happy, but you can no longer be mean to your mother. You can no longer tell Mom to shut up or routinely decide to wear her out with never-ending arguments. If you do those things, you will be spanked." On June 26 he took a belt to Stephen and gave him five whacks that prosecutors said "broke the skin." On July 2 he married Stephen's mother. In August, on a camping trip, he whacked Anthony, who called his real father, Jefferson County sheriff's sergeant John Mayns, who complained to authorities.

Enyart argued in court that his whipping of Stephen was intended to teach the boy to be "loving and respectful," but earlier this month a jury found him guilty of misdemeanor child abuse.

This wasn't the first--or the last--time that Enyart displayed his obsession with male rear ends. Recently, he has come under fire for his TV talk show on KWHD/Channel 53, on which he has celebrated the deaths of gay men by labeling them "sodomites" or "ex-sodomites" and playing the Queen song "Another One Bites the Dust." And although he's no longer doing his gig on KHNC--station owner Don Weideman won't say why--this was how Enyart warmed up his radio audience before his date with the Longmont nurse: Sitting down at a mike alongside Resnick, who was just wrapping up his own show, Enyart launched into his familiar rap about anal sex. "Every one of our founding fathers believed sodomy was a crime," Enyart said. "Sodomy has always been recognized to be an unnatural crime that leads to disease and death, and it will destroy the nation that endorses it...What happens when you bring your kids to a city park and then there's two homos in the park and they start rolling around in the grass and then they start kissing? You want your boys to see that, Norm? Because that's one of the most destructive things a young man could ever see!"

Then Enyart began screeching about the "mainstream homo perversion" emanating from a gay publishing house: "They publish Pedophilia, the Radical Case, which is 300 or 400 pages of a strong legal, ethical argument why it should be okay to have sex with young boys. And they make the argument that if you do it right, boys ages five or six, most of them could be brought to climax!"

Enyart's radio-TV diatribes have provoked a lot of people, but their anger is often misdirected. Neither of the two "Bob Enyarts" listed by US West is the talk-show host. One's a retired fireman and the other's a retired librarian--and both get nagged by nasty calls and letters. "My husband's just had cataract surgery," the wife of the librarian says with exasperation. "He's 84 years old. We don't need this."

The "real" Bob Enyart, on the other hand, has always insisted that he doesn't mind criticism. "You know," he once told a KHNC audience when he discovered a reporter was also listening, "being slammed by Westword is a really positive credential in our business."

Wonder how he'd feel about being spanked?

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